MUSIC; Classical, Now Without The 300-Year Delay

By BARBARA JEPSON

Published: March 26, 2006

REMEMBER that Mozart concert you wanted to get to last month? No, not that one. (Or that one. Or those other 10 or 12.) The one with Lorin Maazel conducting the New York Philharmonic in the last three symphonies at Avery Fisher Hall.

Well, that concert will come to you in high-quality sound on Tuesday, when DG Concerts offers it for digital downloading via the iTunes Music Store (itunes.com). What's more, two programs from the Los Angeles Philharmonic's hip ''Minimalist Jukebox'' series, performed this weekend, are scheduled for release through DG Concerts and iTunes on April 4. Although pricing is not final, each live concert will probably cost about $10 to download, less for complete individual works.

Both orchestras are part of a new initiative by the Universal Music Group built on its Deutsche Grammophon and Decca labels. Christopher Roberts, president for classics and jazz for Universal Music Group International, says that DG Concerts and Decca Concerts will, between them, ultimately service about 10 orchestras in the United States and abroad. Negotiations are under way with orchestras in London, Paris and three German cities. The current intention is for each orchestra to offer, on average, four concerts a season for digital downloading, and one of the four would also be released on CD.

The project reflects a seismic shift in the way music is being discovered, distributed and heard. In 2005, Nielsen SoundScan reports, sales of digital tracks for downloading to computers or portable music players soared to 353 million units in the United States, up 150 percent from 2004. Downloads of digital albums increased 194 percent, to 16 million. Although classical labels arrived late to the party, they, too, are experiencing growth in this area. While sales of classical CD's in the United States decreased by 15 percent last year, SoundScan reports, digital downloads of classical albums grew by 94 percent. More significant, several labels are finding that the classical share of the download music business is about 7 percent, more than twice the share in physical retail outlets.

For the classical music industry, weary of alarmist talk about the graying of its audience, the demographics are promising. ''Ownership of portable music players is generally highest among those from age 15 to their mid-40's,'' said Ted Schadler, an industry analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. But, he added, 84 percent of young online consumers listen to music on their PC's.

Probably few of them are grooving to Chopin or Brahms, but the 1.4 million downloads of free Beethoven symphonies offered by BBC Radio 3 last June proved that audiences for classical music might be larger than anyone thought. There is no guarantee that the digital revolution will bring a new generation of iPod-toting listeners into concert halls, transforming classical music institutions in the process. But the trend has brought a glimmer of hope to the classical record industry, still grappling with the impact of a shakeout that began a decade ago.

Digital jukeboxes like iTunes or subscription services like eMusic (emusic.com) treat classical albums as just another genre, as easy to explore as alternative or world music. ''It's an opportunity to demystify the classics for the causal buyer,'' said Tom Evered, general manager of EMI Jazz and Classics in the United States. A prime attraction of download music stores is the potential purchaser's ability to listen to free excerpts before buying. In the rock arena, this practice has reportedly hurt sales in traditional retail outlets. But in the classical market, more concerned with sound quality, some labels are finding the opposite. ''So far, downloading is not cannibalizing our sales of physical CD's,'' said Chaz Jenkins, the head of LSO Live, the small in-house label of the London Symphony Orchestra, which derived 31 percent of its sales in the United States from digital music last year. ''What we're seeing is that new releases on CD do better when there's also availability on digital music services.''

Not since the advent of the CD two decades ago have record companies had the opportunity to reissue great quantities of their products. ''What I can do now is use our library of over 85,000 tracks in proprietary collections,'' said Jim Sturgeon, the chief executive of Naxos of America, a leading distributor of independent labels, whose total sales through digital service providers were 8 percent of its total sales in 2005 and are projected to reach 13 percent this year.

And since no physical store can stock entire catalogs, digital music providers offer advantages to classical labels, whose products typically sell slowly over the long term. Last year, to celebrate the 80th birthday of Pierre Boulez, Deutsche Grammophon resurrected nearly a dozen of his out-of-print albums for download only and produced a special compilation showcasing him as conductor and composer. This summer, EMI will offer its entire collection of operas and recital programs by the legendary soprano Maria Callas for download.